Smash The Funnel - The Secrets To Massive Revenue Growth

As The Washington Post reports, “Most economists believe the United States will tip into recession by 2021, a new survey shows, despite White House insistence that the economy is sound.

“Nearly 3 out of 4 economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics expect a recession by 2021, according to results released [recently]. The outlook reflects growing skepticism among economists and investors that the U.S. economy will be able to withstand a protracted trade war with China without serious harm amid a weakening global outlook.”

Responsible CEOs should be preparing their companies for the next recession. And if it comes sooner, never comes or comes later than expected, make sure you get full value for your foresight and planning.

We do a ton of educational sessions with CEOs, sales leaders and marketing leaders. One of our favorite questions in the session involves asking the executives if they answer their own office phones, answer their cell phones if they don’t recognize the number or still have phones in their offices.

You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 95% of the people are unreachable by phone of any kind.

For our next question, we ask how many of their revenue generation strategies involve using cold calls to reach their prospects. You might be shocked to know that 80% of the people still have their teams making cold calls.

Customer Advocacy Is A Must-Have For Today’s Marketing And Sales Execution

The world has shifted 180 degrees in the past 10 years. In 2009, sales still ran the show. Sales reps controlled the sales process, leaking information out to prospects on a “need-to-know” basis. If prospects wanted anything, they had to ask a sales rep.

Fast forward to today, and 90% of the buyer journey is self-serve and controlled by your prospects. Your prospects are only reaching out to you for that last bit of information they can’t get on their own, like cost, delivery and terms. You can ignore this reality or embrace it.

Now You Don’t Have To Hire Deloitte Or Accenture To Get A Dedicated Team That Produces Results In Weeks, Not Months Or Even Years

Ask any digital marketing agency and most in-house marketers this question: “How long is it going to take to get results?” The answer is almost always that it will take longer than any CEO would like. We know, because we answer this question constantly.

What you hear (and you might have heard this from your agency) is usually something like this: “Today’s marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.” Again, this is what we told clients all the time. While it’s true, it’s not an optimal answer for companies that want results fast.

That answer is also not 100% accurate. The reason marketers tell you this story is because they can’t do everything they want to do as fast as they need to do it to produce better results faster.

Popular Revenue Growth Podcast Smash The Funnel Returns With 7 New Episodes

Research shows that “right now, there are more than 700,000 active podcasts and more than 29 million podcast episodes. According to Apple at WWDC 2018, these numbers stood at 550,000 and 18.5 million, respectively.” So the figures have increased rapidly in the past year!

What’s fueling the meteoric rise in this content format and how should you consider this as part of your company’s marketing mix?

Right now, you might be thinking, “My prospects and customers aren’t listening to podcasts.” You couldn’t be further from the truth.

There’s more emphasis today on personalization, video, micro-content stories, artificial intelligence, visual search and voice search. We’re moving toward a world where technology will be integral in all aspects of our lives, including work, family and social interaction.

Digital marketers already know the value of SEO and its ability to help rank higher on search engines. Today’s marketing strategy is shifting toward new mediums for attracting and appeasing customers.

Working with digital marketing, inbound, demand generation, revenue growth and sales execution agencies is an excellent idea when you lack the bandwidth or proficiency to drive lead generation, sales growth and overall revenue generation up and to the right.

Under the traditional agency model (practiced by 99% of all agencies today), the people assigned to work with you are also working with between four and 10 other clients. This means you only get their attention for part of the month. It means they’re being pulled in multiple directions by multiple clients and multiple projects.

In some cases, you might only have them for four to five hours a month, yet you’re paying thousands of dollars a month.

Artificial Intelligence Is All The Rage; How Should You Use It To Drive Results?

So much to do, so little time. Marketing has never been more complicated.

With so many tactics, so many software tools to consider, so many different strategies and so much data to analyze, how can anyone make heads or tails from all of this stuff?

Now introduce the idea of artificial intelligence (AI), which is all the rage. Almost every software tool among the over 10,000 MarTech and sales tech solutions have some element of AI included in their stories.

But how many are really helpful, and how do you assess these AI tools to drive results?

Salesforce Research Uncovers Massive Underperformance Across Over 4,000 Companies Surveyed

I’ve always felt like a major disconnect existed between what CEOs were expecting from their investment in marketing and the actual performance of those marketing programs. This was mostly anecdotal, picked up from conversations with prospects and clients.

But Salesforce recently published the fifth edition of its State of Marketing Report, which uncovered trends and insights from over 4,100 marketing leaders worldwide. The major insight was that only 16% of those surveyed said they had a high-performing marketing program.

This high performance was defined as being completely satisfied with their overall marketing performance and the outcomes of their marketing investments.

Did you know that Google updates its search algorithms 500 to 600 times a year? Most of those updates are minor and have little impact on your approach to driving organic rankings.

But roughly eight to 10 times a year, Google releases more significant updates that should at least get your attention. It you want to see all of the latest updates, click here.

This article isn’t about those updates, but we did aggregate the changes we’ve made to our SEO strategy for clients, and those changes do take into consideration the updates over the past few years.

With so many clients under management and most of them engaged in an effort to drive more organic visitors to their sites, these changes are based on our practical experience driving results, not a list of best practices curated from the web.

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